Us Conductors (22 page)

His right hand moved. My eyes darted to my grey gun, quiet on its table, and immediately Danny Finch had glimpsed it too, and he was in motion, lunging, arm outstretched, and I was moving with him toward the same centre of this windowless room. Only I was no longer moving for the gun. I was moving for Danny Finch. There was a table between us and I stepped around it—front-step, my weight on my back leg. I pulled forward with a kick,
jing gerk
, smashing his right knee. He buckled. My fist met his face, knuckles perpendicular to the floor, and I let my hand drop. I pivoted at the hips. I slammed my elbow into his shoulder, a lever at its fulcrum, and he fell sideways. He fell at once. His head clipped the corner of a cabinet and smacked the floor with a sound like a man clapping hands. One clap and there we were, two motionless figures. Danny Finch’s limbs were folded near two legs of the table. I was standing in follow-through: bent at the front knee, arms in
jong sao
, tensed and untensed. On the surface of the table, the perfect stack of files. A harmless metal gun. There was a tiny crack in Danny Finch’s forehead and a line of
blood was now drawing across the tile. I could see part of his brain. I stepped across his body and closed the door. The cabinets were mostly sealed, organized, absolutely inert. Danny Finch was the only mess. I looked at where the edge of a steel shelf had grazed my knuckle. My hands were still. These movements had been efficient and exact, the culmination of study. For a short moment I felt like a kind of master. Then I suppressed the swell of vomit. I realized that I was still drunk. My stomach was swirling and my chest was heaving. I was hot at my temples and collar and wrists. I was a desperate coward. I picked up my jacket from the back of a chair. I picked up my briefcase from the floor, where no blood had touched it. I opened the clasps and put the gun, twelve dossiers, my jacket, inside. Danny Finch was dead at my feet. I had murdered him with my hands. I tried to recall what he had said to me, years ago, when we met. I tried to remember if there had been malice there, the capacity to kill.

I went out of the room, in shirtsleeves, with my briefcase, shutting Danny Finch’s body among the archives. The corridor’s flooring was like a long line of tundra. I turned one corner and another and in the aftershock of adrenaline I discovered that I was blazingly angry, filled with a fury for Danny Finch and a fury for the Karls and a fury for Pash and a fury for the man who called himself Lev. A roaring wrath, roiling at my heart. I passed the harmless janitor, leaning on a doorjamb, cajoling a secretary; I slipped back by stairs to the third; I thought:
I was alone when I met him in that little room, nobody forced me
.

I remembered the sound of the door blowing open. I remembered the way you had looked at me, Clara, the night before, outside the Savoy, in the barren moment when we parted.

Standing in the elevator, beside the operator with the birthmark on his chin, I said, “Main floor.”

He said, “Going down.”

I KNOW THE QUESTIONS
you are asking. You are asking: Did I have to kill this man? You are asking: What did it feel like? You are asking: Did it destroy you? You are also asking the other questions: Did I make sure Danny Finch was dead? Were my fingerprints not everywhere? What of the security man in the lobby, with his accounting of entrances and exits?

Eventually I learned the answers to some of these questions. Others, I still do not know. When I got into the Karls’ grey sedan and we swung away from the Dolores Building, around the block, I did not tell them that I had killed Danny Finch. I opened the briefcase on the seat beside me and they saw the files, saw the gun, and I sat back in silence until we arrived at my home. After they let me out I went down the street to the corner, where a man in a long apron pulled chop suey from a bucket. I scooped the noodles from the plate into my mouth, gnashing, ravenous. When I returned to the house I looked in the mirror. My face was flecked with sauce and scallion, and my eyes were the same as ever.

For weeks, I waited for the police to come to take me away. I kept the front door locked. The brownstone on West 54th Street seemed suddenly rickety, vulnerable, easily invaded. They would smash in the door and thunder up the stairs, and I would be rising from my wires and condensers as they descended upon me, nightsticks knowing. Instead, students rang the doorbell; friends snuck in the back. I told them I was afraid of burglars. They rolled their eyes. I received a phone call from a journalist at the
Times
, asking for a quote regarding the composer Edgard Varèse, an acquaintance. “He’s very pleasant,” I murmured. “Very, very pleasant.” I put down the receiver and wondered whether this had been a test, a sting, the call from a team of G-men to determine if I was at home. I went to the window. The street was filled with girls in skirts and dogs on leashes and pigeons like flying oil spots.

Months passed. Inconceivably, whole months passed. Whenever it happened that Danny Finch’s body was discovered, his broken skull, there was no story in the paper. No policemen came for me, no detectives took my fingerprints. If there were agents who suspected me, spies and spymasters, these spooks were biding their time, waging a larger war. They must have known, in the shadowlands, that Lev Termen was not the Soviets’ only soldier.

I did not feel as if I was a person. If you tore off my hands, ripped off my head, you would find asbestos, chalk dust, tufts of rags. All my blood had been drained away. It lay in an undisturbed pool outside the Savoy. I laughed with my friends and bent over my tools, felt the seasons’ skim over New York City, and I was a scientist, an engineer, a man attending meetings, I was the outer part of myself and not the inner. They repealed Prohibition and I sipped a solitary glass of cherry brandy.

Before long it was another year. I went to my monthly meetings with Karl and Karl—they would say I went dutifully, but there was only the semblance of duty, the soldier in automatic lockstep. The Karls made me drunk. I told them the spry nothings that composed my days. Perhaps they thought the booze made me honest. I went to the appointments they assigned—shook hands, signed papers. Now and then they asked me to steal, to take surreptitious photographs, but I bungled these, forgetting to remove the lens cap, taking the wrong document from the wrong folder. These lapses were neither deliberate nor accidental. I do not know what they were. I sat with Schillinger and Frances at
It Happened One Night
, laughing like a donkey, feeling nothing.

“Leon, how are you?” Lucie Rosen asked one day. She was stooped in the foyer, untying her shoes.

“Fine,” I said.

She raised her eyes to look at me. “You sure?”

“I am very pleasant,” I said.

Nobody wanted my theremins. My meetings with the world’s Bert Grimeses were always on the matter of teletouch—my hocus-pocus of invisible sensing. Shop windows that lit up, displays that moved with every passerby. Nate Stone’s scheme for Macy’s windows had been an enormous hit; he was rich now and kept pestering me for new gimmicks. “Come over,” he’d say. “Wanna ask you about something.” I’d arrive and face his string of spitballed ideas, half concepts and figments, slung across his marble kitchen table. A secretary perched nearby, hunched over her typewriter.

Spinning windmills, Nate suggested. Books that open and close. “Or electric dogs,” he said, “barking over dog food. Wait—cats!”

“Cats barking?” I said.

“Cats meowing.”

“Over dog food.”

“Over
cat
food.”

The typewriter dinged.

I played the dumb Russian because Nate was so boring. His thousand-dollar ideas were for selling cufflinks or toilet paper, each an aesthetic variation on the same root mechanism. It was a decade and a half since I’d invented the radio watchman, and these meetings with Nate and his secretary and that damn dinging typewriter only emphasized the meaninglessness of my present work. I thought with agony of smug, slender Sasha, spending every day in research. “Could you make it rain,” Nate said, “when a customer checks out the umbrellas?” While he envisaged commercial magic, I saw just the same old servos, connected to wet buckets.

My half-life went on. Nate’s secretary sent me carbon-copied minutes. I sat up all night, taking motors out of windmills, screwing them into hollowed-out books. It was 1934 and this was my livelihood.

I tried not to think of you. When I did think of you, I tried to forget your face. I willed it to blur away, water poured onto a watercolour. You would be just another girl, a silhouette, a skirt. I had known many silhouettes.

When you told me No, Clara, it was as if you were rejecting a law.
It is not like this
, you were saying. Denying not my hypothesis but my conclusion. This was not a matter of persuasion. I could not take you back into the Savoy and persuade you that there is no gravity, that there is no death. It was a matter of proof. I needed a lover’s proof, incontrovertible. I did not know where to find it.
It is not like this
, you were saying. The particles were not present. The equation did not resolve. I learned that there was another way to interpret the data. This other way is hideous, heartbreaking. A world that is not as it seems.

In this mistaken world, nothing was not fragile. Which principles would be the next to fall? Which truths were false? I was a scientist and a murderer. I was alone. Was I even alive, down deep, in the deepest part, where at night I felt so barren?

I remember one evening, walking home up Seventh Avenue. It was dark. I came up to Lerners—closed up, abandoned until the morning. Lev Sergeyvich Termen, 60 kilograms, a Howell suit, nothing more. I passed the thirteen shop windows and each, one by one, became illuminated.

IT WAS AN EARLY AUTUMN
morning when I decided to go see Katia. The sun had not risen. I went down the stairs to make my breakfast and as I entered the kitchen I had a sudden longing for the thick red jam she made every summer. I longed for her jam but I could not even recall which berries she had used. The forgetting humiliated me. I took some slices of ham from the icebox and I sat with a stale piece of bread and this plate of ham. I tried to imagine the taste of Russian raspberries, or cranberries, or bilberries, blueberries, ash berries.

At a booth in Penn Station I bought a ticket to New Jersey. I walked to the platform and thought of the platforms in Leningrad, those proud marble pillars. I had taken hundreds of trains from Nikolayevsky, Oktyabrsky, Leningradsky, that station of many names. I had my
Mandat
, then. A card with the words
Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
. May his memory be illuminated. My equipment packed in its cases and me like an arrow from the Soviet, swift and certain, sent along the rails with word of electricity, indisputable truths. In Kazan and Samara I stood in drafty wooden halls, with boxes full of snaking wire, but there were no deceptions when I showed the townsfolk my machines. I was no charlatan.

I sat with my hands between my thighs, alone in the train car. We were late to leave the station. I had not brought a book. This was my first time underneath the Hudson River. It did not seem like a new place. The walls of the passage were invisible in the dark and you could not hear the river, just the
clack-clack, clack-clack
of the train, and I felt as if I were on a ceaseless path into hell. I forgot the tunnel’s engineering feat, forgot the years of work plans and careful digging, and when we emerged into daylight I took a long, grateful breath.